Homemade Soap – Part 1

California, Crafty

Today I’m linking up with Giggles Glitz and Glam, A Bowl Full of Lemons, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Mommy by Day, Crafter by Night, The Kurtz Corner, and Reasons to Skip the Housework. There is so much inspiration packed into those links it makes my head spin.

There are about eleventy billion ways to make soap yourself. You can go the super simple route and buy a melt and pour kit, or you can use one of several recipes for hot process or cold process soap. We decided to do cold process, and the four of us (my husband, his friend and his friend’s girlfriend) took on this hilarious project. We were in charge of ingredients and they were in charge of gear. It worked out pretty well I think considering we ended up with everything we needed! We actually ended up with unmatched amounts of what we needed (tooootally my fault whoops), but the guys are both good at math so we were ok! A little recipe altering and away we went!

Most cold process soap recipes I’ve seen stop where this post stops, but this is only stage one for us. We are going to shave down and melt these bars of soap and add to them. Oatmeal perhaps? Poppyseeds maybe? Oils, for sure!

Homemade Soap - Part 1

The recipe we used was from an old book our friend found at a second hand store and that we quickly became a little obsessed with. I will leave you to find a soap book or website with a recipe on it because there was a lot of changing of things going on in my kitchen when we did this so I don’t want to lead anyone down the wrong path!

Also, we opted for a vegan soap instead of a traditional soap and that changes the recipe as well. Having said that, we used:

Olive Oil
Coconut Oil
Cocoa Butter
and of course, Lye

You’ll also need safety goggles, gloves, a plastic container to heat the lye in, two tall pots, wooden spoons, a scale to measure it all out on and two candy thermometers.

Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Gather your ingredients and gear, cover your table and then do any recipe math you need on your table covers!
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Now following the directions on the lye packaging, add water slowly, pop in the candy thermometer and wait for it to heat up (it’ll do it on it’s own – like magic).
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Now pour the oilve oil and coconut oil into a tall pot and add your cocoa butter, poke at it here and there until it’s all melted and then mix it a bit but you don’t have to really get into it yet.
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Fill a second tall pot about halfway with water and once it gets hot, set the plastic container of warm lye and water in it. You’ll need one candy thermometer with each pot. One IN the soap mixture, touching the melted oils and cocoa butter and one IN the lye and water container (not in the pot it’s sitting in). The necessary temps are different depending on the recipe, so check yours to be sure!
Homemade Soap - Part 1
While we waited for our concoctions to reach their desired temperatures, we gathered and set out all of our soap containers. Remember that we’ll be popping the soaps from these containers and then grating them down and remelting them so we can add to them. Our final containers will be much prettier!
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Once both mixtures reached the right temperatures, we poured the lye into the soapy mixture and mix, mix, mixed! It starts to thicken up a bit but is still runny, and that’s how it’s supposed to look so we’re all relieved!
Homemade Soap - Part 1
It’s a slightly messy process but that’s why we covered the table before we started, right?! We filled almost every container we pulled out for this project and then covered each one with tinfoil and set them on top of our kitchen cabinets to dry for a week! Stay tuned!!
Homemade Soap - Part 1
Homemade Soap - Part 1
2 Comments

1 Comment

  1. Kathleen Neto  •  May 26, 2012 @1:41 am

    Very good post!!

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